I wasn’t able to use my Visa card at the McDonald’s in London and the clerk just pointed me to the ATM outside in the parking lot and said just go get some cash there.
Also, I’m pretty sure the ATM’s in the Airport Terminal are set up to take non-PIN cards.
My bank seems to know if I am outside the country when I try to transfer funds between accounts using the app on my phone. The transaction never goes through. I usually end up calling my wife at home to do the transfer from there.
Check with your bank to see if they have a relationship with any european banks. If you can use those ATMs, you may be able to save quite a bit on fees.
This is a dangerous thing to do: you’re trusting the local Wifi. You’re also trusting that nobody will be eavesdropping.
IIRC Amex is a charge card, not a credit or debit card. It seems to be less accepted these days round here - I’ve heard that Amex charge the retailer more.
What I suggest you do is find out if your bank has a European partner and set up an account with them. You will then get a European debit card with chip and pin. Load up your new account with money and you’re good to go.
That’s a damn complicated thing to do, specially since he’ll be travelling to four different countries. His bank may have partner networks in some of them but not the others, and the same would happen to any bank he happens to pick here. If his bank has a partner network he should use it whenever possible, but he doesn’t need to set an European account nor does he get any advantage from it.
To mitigate that, you can use a VPN service. All any eavesdropper or compromised wifi router will see is the encrypted stream between you and the VPN. I use PrivateTunnel when I’m using untrusted wifi.